Sweepingly Positive: Custodian Chris Garrett serves as a valued staff member to the SM East community

When Lead Custodial Manager Chris Garrett started working at SM East in May 2021, he couldn’t even fold up a cafeteria table. The pain was just too much. 

Garrett spent most of his time submitting work orders on his computer. He occasionally helped pick up hallway trash, but only did about half of the average custodian's workload. 

Four months prior, Garrett had a near-death experience. He can’t quite recall the whole memory — it’s still in fragments. Despite his accident, he remains a valued staff member in the whole East community.  

In January 2021, Garrett was spending his Sunday evening cleaning Rushton — a school where he didn't even work —  when his boss offered him an extra shift. He had swept and mopped every hallway and taken out every trash can: a daily chore for him as the then-custodian at Indian Hills Middle School. 

Garrett remembers checking the school one last time and exiting the kitchen with leftover trash bags. What happened next is blank. 

Security camera footage shows Garrett slipping back on a stairwell and diving headfirst down a story and a half, not touching a single stair on the way down. He ended up unconscious at the bottom of the cement stairwell. 

“The doctor said I couldn't have gotten any closer to being dead,” Garrett said. 

Almost everything from Garrett’s skull to his waist was either broken or fractured. His hands took most of the impact as he reached out just before making contact with the concrete. This saved his life; if he hadn’t, the doctors said his neck would’ve snapped.

A neighbor luckily found him while walking on a trail going right past the stairwell where Garrett fell. The neighbor called 911, which brought an ambulance that took Garrett to the hospital. 

"I had a brain bleed," Garrett said. "If I hadn't been found within 20 minutes, they said I wouldn't have made it."

Initially, the doctors didn’t know if Garrett would live. 

He didn't have any memory until three days after the fall. He vaguely remembers waking up in the intensive care unit. He couldn’t see anything, but could recall a conversation between a plastic surgeon and his family. 

When doctors finally released him to go home, he had to relearn how to get up and walk. He’d start small, walking around his room. Then he’d start moving around the house. Then around his backyard. And eventually started walking 10 minutes around the block.

 During his recovery, he had to slowly build back his old habits.  

During this time, Garrett also had to piece together the traumatic events that had happened to him. His short-term memory was damaged, and he kept having strange nightmares he couldn’t remember or understand.

“[The nightmares] made no sense,” Garrett said. “It was pain and jumbled stuff, and still looking back, I don't understand them.”

Even in his recovery months, Garrett would work overtime on weekends and after school at SM East to support himself and his family. While teachers will describe Garrett as a trustworthy and kind person, others also see him as a workaholic, including custodian Price Wright. 

On typical weeks, Garrett will work six days, sometimes seven. He arrives at SM East at 6 a.m. and on some nights won't leave until 8 p.m. He works weekends sometimes, just so the other custodians don’t have to work; he says it's his job as the lead man. 

“If I ever win the lottery, I’d give Chris $50,000 and say, ‘Get out of here, man, $50,000 just take a long break, dude,’” Wright said. “I gotta win the lottery first though.”

Most of Garrett's jobs come from his walkie-talkie, nestled in the front pocket of his jeans. 

“Ryan Johnson to Chris Garrett.”

The walkie-talkie blares through the cafeteria, cutting Garrett off mid-sentence. He pauses his conversation and presses the talk button on the device. 

“This is Chris. Go ahead.”

Garrett adjusts the volume dial as Athletic Director Ryan Johnson says he needs someone to unlock the observation tower on the lower field — something Garrett can easily do with one of the 35 keys he keeps on a metal carabiner attached to his belt. Garrett gets up and treks to the lower field.

While Garrett couldn’t even get up out of bed three years ago, he now walks several miles every day. From his office in the depths of the first floor, it takes four staircases and a ramp to reach the fifth floor, a journey he makes multiple times a day. 

But today, his walk is easy. It only takes him three and a half minutes to get from the cafeteria to the lower turf field to unlock the observation tower.

During the short walk, he says “hello” to two teachers and a lunch lady, making casual conversation as he walks away. 

“He knows probably every single person in this building, staff-wise,” environmental education teacher Rusty DeBey said. 

Once Garrett reaches the three-story metal observation tower on East’s football field, he fumbles with the carabiner, finding the right key in about 10 seconds. All while making small talk with the Mill Valley athletic director, who needed the tower unlocked. 

When Garrett is done, the AD thanks him, and Garrett is on his way back to his office with a smile on his face. He just completed his favorite part of the job (even if it's with the opposing football team’s AD) — the personal connections. 

“If I weren't doing this for you students, I wouldn't be here,” Garrett said. “Thank goodness I'm able to do this job and do it well.”

Junior Halle Klocke met Garrett for the first time last year after she gave him an appreciation card for “National Custodian Day.” She was upset that the school didn’t do anything to recognize Garrett, so during the passing period, she made the walk to his first-floor office to deliver the card.

When Garrett received the card, he didn’t even know “National Custodian Day” was a thing, but appreciated Klocke’s thoughtfulness nonetheless. He keeps her brightly colored card hung up in his office. 

Since then, Garrett has made conversation with Klocke whenever they pass in the halls. He even nicknamed her “Halle Berry,” after the famous actress.  

During one of their hallway conversations, Garrett mentioned that his 62nd birthday was on Sept. 2. The night before his birthday, Klocke made him a card that read “Happy Birthday, Mr. Garrett,” complete with hand-drawn balloons and confetti in bright colors. 

Klocke made a pass during her sixth hour to go to the bathroom, but instead looked to surprise Garrett. She eventually found him in the commons and gave him the card. 

“I ran in there. I was like, ‘It's your birthday, right?’ And he was really surprised,” Klocke said. “He was like, ‘You're so awesome, I'll put this next to the photo of my grandkids.”

And his connections aren’t limited to just teachers and students. Garrett will befriend anyone. Two SM East moms, Kara Harmon and Amanda Lowry, say they adore him for the care he shows for his coworkers. 

Harmon and Lowry are part of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association and started a fundraiser to get a new refrigerator for the teachers' lounge in May 2024. The fridge in the fourth-floor teachers' lounge was awful. The makeshift shelves were plywood, and the fridge could barely keep a soda cold until lunchtime. 

They coordinated with Garrett to pick up the fridge from the loading dock in the lower lot and bring it to the teachers' lounge. Harmon and Lowry were planning on taking the old plywood-shelf fridge to the dumpster when Garrett said he would take it and fix it up for the custodial staff. 

Before the new fridge, the janitors only had a freezer, which made it inconvenient when trying to keep lunches cold without freezing. 

“[Garrett] said, ‘This will be great. We'll love this,’” Lowry said. “And we were like, ‘No, we're not gonna do that.’ And so we were able to raise enough money that we could also find him a fridge for his staff.” 

While Garrett says he doesn’t use the new fridge often, he's glad it helps his coworkers, and Harmon and Lowry say that's just the way Garrett is.

Harmon and Lowry describe Garrett as selfless. He stands as someone who ensures all his employees have lunch before he starts eating and does all the dirty jobs because he doesn’t want his staff members to do them. Garrett thinks he owes it to them after not being able to work at his full potential for the first year of his job as the East custodial building manager.

It wasn’t until a year after the fall that he was finally able to do all the normal janitorial duties. 

“Price look,”  Garrett called out. 

It was December, almost a year after his fall. He stood up in front of his coworker in the cafeteria, beaming. 

“I mastered lifting a table!”

Garrett had done it. He had lifted a lunchroom table all by himself — no help required.